But while Franzen clearly has no problem with critical praise, it is the last accolade that has given him pause. Although he agreed to let Oprah pick his book, and his publisher, Farrar, Straus & Giroux agreed to print special "Oprah Book of the Month" copies with a big "O" embossed on the cover, Franzen has since made a series of critical remarks about Oprah's club, her previous selections and her audience. Most recently, he turned down the usually perfunctory book dinner, in which the author of the month, Winfrey and selected fans eat and discuss the book, portions of which are later shown on "Oprah." He told the Portland Oregonian that "I see this as my book, my creation, and I don't want that logo of corporate ownership on it."

Such a reaction should come as no surprise coming from a guy who hangs out with David Foster Wallace and Donald Antrim and lists Don DeLillo and Thomas Pynchon as his major influences. Such a close identification with grad-school darlings immediately locates Franzen clearly on one side of America's long-entrenched literary divide — the literati versus the hoi-polloi, sophistication versus mass consumption. Right down to his wardrobe — thick-rimmed geek glasses and tweed jackets abound — Franzen really wants to be one of these guys, among them, someday read by bluestockings and Ph.D. candidates. And he seems, like DeLillo and Pynchon, to want to comment on society, to try and capture its ethos in print, but otherwise keep his hands clean of popular culture.

And yet that's not what he wants, or at least not what he says he wants. In 1996, he wrote "Perchance to Dream," a lengthy essay in Harper's that decried the current state of the novel in American society and called for authors to become more engaged in society, to link their work more fully into contemporary cultural currents. The essay reads like an announcement of his intention to write the next Great American Novel.

These days, he says he was misunderstood, that he didn't want to write the Great American Novel, or even a social novel. What he wanted to do was to become a "social novelist." He told Salon that

The essay I wrote was animated more by a concern with where the novelist today fits into the culture. I had the feeling that Fitzgerald and Hemingway and even Bellow and Roth and Updike had really spoken to the country and gotten something back and been in their not-huge but significant way celebrities. They were writers to whom the country looked in order to understand their own lives and to have some sense of where we were as a country, and that role was disappearing, or had disappeared, or had shifted to a modernist fringe within the literary community that was for a tiny audience, or an academic audience. That essay was about the social novelist, more than the social novel.

It is a sentiment that couldn't have come at a better time. Within days of the book's release, America went through the shock of Sept. 11, and in its wake the entire culture was momentarily out of whack. People everywhere waited for someone or something to give them direction, to help them, as Franzen says, "understand their own lives and to have some sense of where we were as a country."

"The Corrections," with its depiction of a middle-class, middle-American family caught in the throes of hypermodern America, could have been that something, and Franzen that someone. The book straddles the divide between New York and Peoria, taking both Middle America and Midtown Manhattan to task. It dabbles in irony but refuses to be consumed by it. It attempts to understand our culture not to the exclusion of "hedonistic" New York or "sansabelt" Kansas but to the inclusion of everything.

It would seem, then, that Oprah's selection represented not only a success for Franzen in his quest to be a social novelist, but also a signal that the book had transcended mere novel status and had the chance, by dint of an overwhelming public reception, to become a cultural artifact, a book that, like "Catch-22" or "The Great Gatsby," came at the right time and said the right things and forever changed not just grad-school courses or bestseller lists but both, and everything else.

Why, then, did Franzen flinch? Why did he distance himself from Oprah instead of using the opportunity to bring the full meaning of the book's themes to a wider audience? Was he afraid of over-commercialization? Not likely — no one who writes 550-plus pages of commentary on the double-edged sword of contemporary culture could believe that all press is bad press. Franzen, one would hope, is smarter than that.

More likely is that Franzen was unprepared for the full impact of what being a social novelist entailed. He wrote a novel that commented on the state of contemporary society, and yet he didn't foresee how contemporary society would comment on the book. He wanted to say his piece, watch it be debated in the New York Review of Books, maybe even Time, and then take his place in the high-brow hall of fame. One imagines he fears an Oprah selection jeopardizes that dream — that if too many housewives and middle managers pick up his book, then Wallace and Antrim and Pynchon and DeLillo might shun him as too bourgeois.

Which is a shame, because it is that very divide, the chasm between coast and center, that narrowed momentarily after Sept. 11. Everyone was on the same page, if not on the same note. Franzen goofed because he didn't realize that he could be both a critic's darling and an Oprah staple, a name dropped in both department coffee klatches and PTA meetings. A truly social novelist, who had important things to say at a time when important things needed to be said.

E-mail Clay Risen at risenc@yahoo.com.